Together with David Bailey and Terence Donovan, he made up the trio of photographers known as the "Black Trinity", who defined the spirit of the decade with their edgy portraits of actors, models and musicians.

On Saturday, Bailey, the only surviving member of the Black Trinity, led tributes to his lifelong friend, who died after lengthy battle with lung cancer.

"I will deeply miss arguing with him," he told The Sunday Telegraph. "If you said "Good morning" to Duffy, he'd question it, that was his charm but I could do that Cockney thing with him of defusing it with humour.

"Cantankerous was a word made for Duffy, it was just his character. You always knew it was never going to be dull with him, because he was always going to pick an argument somewhere down the line.

"Duffy and Donovan are the people I've known longest in the world, and now two of them are gone. With Duffy, it was continuous dialogue and banter. He had that Irish madness about him, he was very quick-witted, and the banter held us three together.

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"Even though he could be grumpy, I remember laughing all the time with him."

"But he should really have been a painter, because then he could have been by himself and not have to deal with people with opinions.

Notorious for his bad temper, Duffy once attempted to destroy all of his work on a bonfire after a member of his staff infuriated him by asking where he kept his spare loo-rolls.

In an interview last year, he recalled attempting to burn his back catalogue in 1979: "I realised I was chairman, CEO and senior stockholder in my business, and now I was responsible for the toilet paper."

Duffy gave up photography for the rest of his life after the incident, becoming one of the country's leading restorers of Regency furniture.

Lord Puttnam, the film producer, described his friend as "irreverent, loving and irresistible". He said: "Brian Duffy was far more than a gifted photographer: he was a uniquely constructive 'social anarchist'. Being around Duffy could be explosive and even alarming, but never, ever, dull."

Giles Huxley-Parlour, the head of photography at Chris Beetles gallery, worked with Duffy curating a retrospective exhibition of his work last year.

He said: "He was a wonderfully opinionated, charming gentleman. He had a freestyle way of having conversations that was very refreshing. A lunch with Brian Duffy would always last for three hours and it was incredibly entertaining.

"But he was also a very humble guy who really couldn't believe that people would still be interested in his photographs all these years later and was amazed when people came to see the show in their droves.

"His photography embodied the youth culture ethic that developed in the Sixties and in fact he helped to develop it, blowing away the past of the stuffy 1950s class-ridden country, and producing a much more meritocratic art scene with predominantly working class people making it big without having to pretend to be posh.

"It can't be emphasised enough how much the photography of Brian Duffy, David Bailey and Terence Donovan altered the look of 1960s England."

Duffy's work was recently celebrated in a BBC Four documentary, The Man Who Shot the Sixties.

The artist and designer, Molly Parkin, who ran a fashion boutique in Chelsea, west London, during the 1960s, said: "Because he was the most objectionable [of the photographers] he was the most interesting."

One model who posed for Duffy and dropped cigarette ash on his studio floor, was said to have left with the contents of the ashtray emptied into her handbag.

The actress, Joanna Lumley, who posed for Duffy with her son Jamie during the Sixties, recalled the photographer plying his models with wine, and refusing to photograph them until they sang.

Born to Irish parents in London in 1933, Duffy studied painting at St Martins School of Art in 1950, but switched to fashion design because, as he said, there were " a lot of good-looking girls doing it".

In 1954, he was offered a position with the fashion house Balenciaga, but turned it down to work as a freelance fashion artist at Harper's Bazaar magazine.

It was during his time there that Duffy saw some contact sheets on the art director's desk, and decided to become a photographer.

Duffy made his name in fashion photography, beginning his career at Vogue magazine, before moving to the Getty picture agency, and became one of only a few photographers to have shot two Pirelli calendars.

Few celebrities of the 1960s and 1970s escaped Duffy's lens, which created memorable images of sitters including Brigitte Bardot, Blondie, Sir Michael Caine and the former Prime Minister, Harold Wilson.

In 1967, together with the novelist Len Deighton, he set up the film production company Deighton Duffy, which produced the film adaptation of Deighton's OnlyWhen I Larf in 1968 starring Richard Attenborough and Oh! What a Lovely War in 1969 starring Corin Redgrave.

During the 1970s, he expanded his photography portfolio and began working on campaigns for the companies including Smirnoff and Benson and Hedges, the tobacco firm for whom he created a series of surreal advertisements in 1977.

Duffy, who died on Monday, is survived by his wife, June, whom he married in 1956, and their four children.

Chris Duffy, his eldest son, said: "Dad lived life on his own terms and by his own rules and spent a lifetime going against mediocrity.

"He didn't realise how brilliant he was, but he inspired all those around him, and left behind an amazing legacy. #